Which of the following two places in Mumbai had Salt Markets during the British time ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), Bhendi Bazar and Wadala. Begin with the structure of the options, because it does half the work. Wadala appears in all four, so the question does not turn on Wadala at all; it turns on which of the four other names belongs beside it, and the candidate's task is to test C.S.M.T., Bhendi Bazar, Charni Road and Panvel one by one. Wadala's own credentials are not in doubt and are worth knowing for their own sake. The north-eastern part of Wadala is covered by salt pans lying along the shores of Thane creek, and salt has been made on that shoreline since long before the British; under the Salt Act of 1882 the colonial government held a monopoly on the manufacture and collection of salt, restricted its handling to government salt depots and taxed it, and a violation of the Act was a criminal offence. That is what made Wadala politically important: during the Civil Disobedience Movement the Wadala salt works were raided on 1 June 1930 by about fifteen hundred Congress volunteers responding to an appeal published in the Congress Bulletin the previous day, and the authorities detained a number of them, among them eleven women. Wadala is therefore the fixed half of the pair, and the answer is decided by the other half. Bhendi Bazar is the keyed partner. It is one of the old market quarters of the island city, lying in South Mumbai between Mohammed Ali Road and Khetwadi, in the belt of bazaars that also holds Crawford Market — now Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market — Chor Bazaar and Nul Bazaar, and it grew in the British period as a dense quarter of trade and of housing for the labour that worked the port and the city. A market quarter of that kind, close to the docks and to the wholesale trades, is the natural place for the sale of a commodity whose manufacture was concentrated on the eastern shore at Wadala, and the pairing in the key is of the place where salt was made with the place where it was traded. The other three options fail for reasons that can be stated without any knowledge of salt at all, and those reasons are set out against each of them below. The answer to be marked is option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) C.S.M.T. is a railway station, not a market, and it is younger than the trade the question asks about. The terminus was designed by Frederick William Stevens from an initial design by Axel Haig, begun in 1878 to the south of the old Bori Bunder station and completed in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and opened to the public on 20 May 1888. It was called Victoria Terminus until March 1996, when it became Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and it was renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in 2017; it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the headquarters of the Central Railway. Its neighbourhood does contain the great colonial market of Crawford Market, now the Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market, and that association is probably what makes the option feel plausible. But the option names the terminus, and a terminus, however grand, is not a salt market; it is the piece of infrastructure that carried goods away from one.  (c) Charni Road is a neighbourhood of South Mumbai on the western side of the island, served by the station of the same name on the Western line, and its name records grazing rather than trade. The accepted account is that when the government raised a tax on cattle grazing at the Azad Maidan, Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy bought grasslands near Thakurdwar and opened them to the people to graze their cattle free of charge; the Marathi word for grazing is charne, the area became Charni and the road beside it Charni Road. An alternative account derives the name from Chendni in the Thane-Koliwada area, from which people migrated to this part of the city. Either way the area is associated with the Girgaum and Chowpatty side of the island, with chawls, the diamond trade of Opera House and the Girgaon festivals, and not with the salt trade of the eastern shore, which lay across the island on the harbour side.  (d) Panvel fails on the plainest ground available: the stem asks for two places in Mumbai, and Panvel is not in Mumbai. It lies across the harbour on the mainland, in what is now Raigad district, at the head of the creek that separates the mainland from Trombay and Salsette, and it has long been a market town and a junction on the route inland to Pune. Its position on a tidal creek does place it in the same coastal geography of creeks and marshes in which salt was made along this coast, and that is exactly why the option is offered — it is the plausible-sounding name for a candidate who is thinking about salt but not about the boundary of the city. The discipline the option rewards is the one every question about places demands: read the geographical qualifier in the stem, here 'in Mumbai', and apply it before considering anything else.

Concept: Salt is one of the threads that ties the physical geography of Bombay to its politics. The island city and its eastern suburbs sit against a coastline of tidal creeks and low marshy flats, and such flats are ideal for making salt by solar evaporation: sea water is admitted at high tide into shallow pans, allowed to concentrate, and the crystallised salt is scraped and carried away. Wadala, on the harbour side, has been a salt-making area of exactly this kind, its northern flats running to the shores of Thane creek. The British made salt an instrument of revenue: the Salt Act of 1882 gave the government a monopoly of manufacture and collection, confined lawful handling to government salt depots and levied a tax, so that even those living beside the sea were required to buy salt from the government. That is the law Gandhi chose as the first target of satyagraha in 1930, breaking it at Dandi on 6 April 1930 and setting off a year of civil disobedience; in Bombay the movement fastened on the Wadala salt works, which about fifteen hundred volunteers raided on 1 June 1930. Alongside the making of salt there was the selling of it, and that belonged to the city's market quarters — the belt of bazaars behind the docks that includes Crawford Market, Chor Bazaar, Nul Bazaar and Bhendi Bazar, quarters that grew in the colonial period as trade and labour concentrated around the harbour.

State PCS 2022 Q90 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q90 — History PYQ with Answer